Peculiar Crossroads
Peculiar Crossroads
Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction

Farrell O’Gorman

Southern Literary Studies
Fred Hobson, Series Editor

ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3335-4 PAPER
Page count: 272
Trim: 6 x 9
Illustrations: none
Published: 2008

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In Peculiar Crossroads, Farrell O'Gorman explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, O'Gorman asserts, these two unabashedly Catholic authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha. O'Gorman builds his argument with biographical, historical, literary, and theological evidence, examining the writers' work through intriguing pairings, such as O'Connor's Wise Blood with Percy's The Moviegoer, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find with Percy's Lancelot. An impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism, Peculiar Crossroads renders a genuine understanding of the Catholic sensibility of both O'Connor and Percy and their influence among contemporary southern writers.

Farrell O'Gorman, a native of South Carolina, lives in Chicago, where he is a professor in DePaul University's Catholic Studies Department.